September 26, 2023

• Global trade has declined fast the second half of 2023
• Container trucking is looking to further reductions in the winter.

At the same time, there has been an expansion of the number of trucks and transport companies on the roads in the USA even though there have been a significant number of bankruptcy in the industry. A similar growth is visible in Canada.

The growth has come in leased and more precarious employment with small carriers driving the growth in capacity available.

Freightwaves reports that, in the USA:

roughly 42% of that growth came from carriers with one to six tractors.

The capacity bubble that happened just after the pandemic seems to be bursting, meaning many workers who recently entered industry have been caught out.

Workers are facing cuts to hours and low wage increases. In the USA, the situation is driving drivers to unionize with Teamsters (and even UFCW) at EMC/Werner.

A major campaign by the Teamsters in California to pass legislation on autonomous trucking has been nixed by the state's governor.

The focus of the campaign was to adopt legislation to ban autonomous trucking in the state in an attempt to slow-down the money and resources going into capping costs of workers in the industry.

Autonomous trucking is already working in many areas in the USA where there are private roads or simple "conveyor belt" set-ups along highways where there are not many turns and few cars.

The legislation passed with support because of recent increase in autonomous passenger cars blocking intersections and emergency vehicles.

The veto by the governor means that money will continue to flow into the unnecessary technology.

Overwhelming legislative support for ban

Both legislative chambers overwhelmingly supported AB 316. It was introduced in January after the Department of Motor Vehicles and the California Highway Patrol began discussions about a framework governing heavy-duty autonomous trucking. The state allows driverless vehicles up to 10,000 pounds, mostly ride-hailing passenger vehicles.

• Ohio maintenance workers filed suit exposing harassment and discrimination on the job about their sexual orientation.
• Transport America is the subsidiary of focus for the suit.

The suit shows that there is a lot of work to do within the industry to increase diversity of the workforce.

• Long timelines laid-out for repairs are the focus of the report about the Kingston derailment involving a bridge owned by CN Rail.
• Inspectors pointed to the poor condition of the bridge months before action was taken and many times previous to the final inspection.
• 40 other factors are identified in the report

• CBC got access to the Transport Canad review through access to information requests. It is not clear why the CBC needed to resort to FOI to get access to the report.

  It found CN's inspections of the span weren't carried out at the required frequencies and pointed specifically to a 2020 underwater report that indicated algae at the site, but didn't provide any further evaluation of the bridge substructure or river bed.

  "The report does not meet the expectation" of CN's own bridge safety management plan (BSMP), it reads.

  An issue was also noted with the 2023 underwater probe, which didn't provide riverbed condition or sampling of the timbers.

  A 2022 CN inspection rated some bents — the piles and base that support a bridge over water — near Bath Road as being in poor condition, according to Transport Canada.

• Inspections seem to be failing to drive investment by CN on some aging track infrastructure.

A common problem across the industry along with a lot of pressure not to find issues on trains that are too costly. BNSF has be accused of firing a worker who found "too many mistakes".